The Internet facilitates a more dispersed business environment by allowing employees, vendors, and customers to communicate and conduct business via e-mail and/or audio (telephone conferencing) techniques. However, such information exchange mechanisms lack the benefit of the more personal face-to-face contact that can provide a more effective and productive environment.
Existing video conferencing systems provide a limited view of a participant's work environment and are even less effective when the meeting requires drawings or sketching on a whiteboard, for example. Panoramic camera systems for wide-angle viewing can be utilized to record and broadcast meetings by recording not only the video images of the meeting environment, but also by providing a microphone array for recording audio input so out-of-location viewers can see and hear meeting interactions.
The camera/microphone base system is typically positioned on a table surrounded (to some extent) by the meeting participants to provide adequate input to the microphone system for speaker detection. Microphone arrays can be employed with technology to estimate the sound source localization (SSL) of a conference room table. However, SSL often generates false positives due to reflections in the room. In one analysis, about half of the false positives point to the wrong half-plane of the table.
The base microphone array cannot accurately estimate the distance of the speaker from the base system due to the short baseline. Additional microphones are required to accurately estimate the distance. Conventional solutions for approximating range include adding a microphone to the camera and use the satellite microphone, with limited success.